Friday, November 27, 2015

‘HELP ME FIND MY FAMILY’ was the
headline on the Daily Nation and The Standard. I went through all the
faces of the children published by Glory Children’s Home as though I was
looking for one I had lost, or knew.

She was there, Blessed Angie but going
by Brenda Kimanthi. Blessed Angie was dumped by her mother immediately after birth
at Dandora dumpster. That’s where Glory got her, named her Blessed Angie for
the cameras, but in the Home she was Number 22.

I found Blessed Angie three years ago. I was a volunteer consultant
child psychologist for Glory Children’s Home.

I was wrapping up for the day when I looked under the table, and
there she was. The cutest two-year-old toddler I ever saw, all smiles playing
with her doll.

She was staring at me, her eyes cloudy, her skin goose-bumped. Most
children’s homes do this: they expose some kids to diseases to get donors and
sponsors. But when I extracted her from under the bed and held her in my arms,
I knew that something other than children care was going on.

When Number 22 looked at me with her cataracts eyes, my heart
knotted into a fist. A week later she disappeared from the Home. My version of
a safe house home became her new abode in Lavington, Nairobi. I fired myself
and started fighting what was going on at the Home.

The National Medical and Research Institute had
colluded with Glory Children’s Home to experiment on the children. I confirmed
my fears last week.

NAMRI doctors provided paediatric services to the
children while extracting their cells for research. Apparently I too was about
to be recruited to conduct a stuttering experiment on the children—to give some
positive speech therapy and others negative speech therapy. I am not such a
monster.

The doctors were researching on cell mapping. They had
found that human cell mapping through recombination could be engineered on new-borns
up to age three. This, combined with HeLa cells—cells in the immortal cell line
used in scientific research—could be used for test research on HIV/Aids and
cancer cure. Apparently Professor Obel’s formula for his magic HIV/Aids drug
had been stolen. But they did not get satisfied with that. They wanted more. They
discovered that the hybrid cells could be manipulated to increase longevity at
that young stage. They started cloning the kids, producing miniature super
humans who could live up to 180 years or more.

These
clones were being sold on the black market to barren women, career women who
did not want to have kids of their own and didn’t have time for the lengthy and
bureaucratic adoption process, scientists in America and Canada for more
experiments, and Chinese were using them for research on effects of radiation
for their top secret nuclear plants in Kenya. The originals, after being
hollowed out of their better parts, poisoned, and infected with HIV/Aids, were
the ones Glory published on dailies calling onto the public to help get back to
their families. The kids didn’t live more than a month.

They
wanted to take my Blessed Angie from me now. Anyone seeing her with me would
know that I had stolen her. Definitely I wouldn’t have adopted her, or given
birth because I was once trapped in a man’s body.

I
scanned the newspaper again. There was no way they could have accessed Angie
and taken her photo. Well, that’s what age-progression software is for. And
then my mole on the inside called—she had evidence. I could go public.

Blessed Angie, six
years, the brightest brain I’ve ever seen, loves reading. She surprised me when
she did it before her third birthday—she read Vaishnavi Ram Mohan’s The Incredible Adventures of Pisho Pencil
and Joseph Bokea’s Magic cover to
cover. She’s now reading James Patterson’s Maximum
Ride series. I think by the time she’s ten she’d have read all medical
books and moving on to esoteric stuff.

I have given
Blessed Angie as good a life as possible. She has suffered bouts of
post-traumatic stress disorder, and epilepsy. She’s just learning to trust.

I know for a woman
who can’t conceive naturally or who won’t be crazy enough to bring a kid to
this fucked up world, not even with Jesus Christ himself, I’m coming out as a left-wing
children rights activist. No one knows Number 22 exists. I could be arrested
and sued for kidnap, which probably is the eventual scheme of things. But for
the time being I am her protector.

Blessed Angie puts
her Angel: A Maximum Ride Novel in
her backpack and follows me. She leaves me locking the door and setting the
alarm and goes to the car.

I watch her open
the passenger door and get in, strap herself in, and open her bag for the book.
How such intrepid humans could experiment on such innocent kids, I wonder as I
head to the car.